Almost instantly we left the red engine behind. As the road straightened, he came up on a few cars and swerved past them with shouts of “Old goat!” He shifted gears and kept accelerating, though the train was far behind. Then he braked, holding my brother and me in place with his right arm, the air forced from my lungs as he spun the wheel with his free hand. We pulled onto the crossing, though the warning lights on both posts were flashing and bells were ringing.
With the truck straddling the tracks, he switched the motor off. He relaxed in his seat, looking out the passenger window, straight along the railroad.
As if on a TV screen, the train appeared in the distance, plummeting toward us. The engine broke from the shadow of the trees. Sunlight struck its red paint, and my brother and I began to scream.
My father turned the ignition.
“Oh no! It’s not starting!” He was twisting the key but didn’t give the engine gas. We knew the ritual and shouted, “Give it gas!”
He gave it gas and the motor fired. The truck shook but didn’t move. The train engine was sounding its horn, filling up the tracks, its two narrow windows glaring down at us.
The truck’s tires screeched, and we lurched and shot onto the road.
The train rushed past behind us, its iron wheels thudding over the crossing.
“That was a close call!” my father shouted and laughed like a pirate. But my brother had gone pale and he turned to me, his eyes so wide that I saw just how close we’d come to being crushed. “We almost died,” he said.
I glanced from him to my father, whose wild bellowing filled the cab. My fear had passed, and the air I drew into my lungs felt more alive, charged with a sudden, mysterious joy. I couldn’t help but laugh with him.
✴
OUR YELLOW FARMHOUSE was on the narrow road that ran the center of the valley. An apple tree and a row of blueberry bushes separated our back porch from damp fields, and the only neighbor my age was Ian, a dirty-faced farm boy with a intellectually disabled older sister. Though I spent many afternoons with Ian, I never learned his sister’s name. I simply thought of her as Ten Speed, because she raced up and down the road all day on what he referred to as “the ten speed.” She had wide-set eyes and was always listening to a bulky black tape player clipped to her belt, its headphones holding her mess of brown curls in place.
Pine forest topped the mountains, large trees distinct like spurs against the sky in the hour before sunset. Many of the fields around our house were planted with Christmas trees, hundreds of neat rows of the pine, fir, and spruce that my father sold each December.
By the time we arrived home, he’d convinced my brother and me to keep our adventure between the three of us. His joyful mood had ended as soon as we pulled into the driveway, and he said he had to check the trees—something to do with an order for spruce. We were to go inside, but the thrill of train racing hadn’t worn off, and I couldn’t bear the thought of staying in the house with my mother and sister. When I begged to tag along, he hesitated. “Okay. Come on,” he said.
As the two of us walked the rows, I asked him to tell me a story. He stared ahead, taking slow, deep breaths between his parted lips, as he stepped evenly, lightly over the wet, tufted earth. I had a specific story in mind. When I was younger, my mother had told me I’d someday grow facial hair, and I’d pictured myself, my face hidden in a stinky beard as I showed up to class and sat in the back, terrifying the other kids. I cried, and my father laughed at me. I was so embarrassed and angry that he told me about a fat bearded woman he’d lived with before my mother. She sat on him so he couldn’t leave, but he wiggled from beneath her butt and ran away because he didn’t want children with beards.
He stayed silent now, narrowing his eyes the way his dogs did before they ran after something. He kept six German shepherds in a pen, and whenever he let them out, they sniffed the air and gazed into the distance, the wind ruffling their fur, and then they raced away so suddenly that I felt they were the happiest animals on earth.
But he just walked, and I followed him to the Christmas tree fields on the other side of the road. We stepped over sagging barbed wire and crossed a stream on a plank nailed with asphalt shingles for grip. I lingered to watch for trout in the pools beneath overhanging trees. He kept on and I ran to catch up.
When I took his hand, his fingers closed slightly.
“Which story?” he asked.
“About the bearded woman.”
He nodded and said, “If she’d been your mother, you’d have a beard.”
He’d been like this more and more—at first normal, making jokes, doing something fun and crazy, laughing wildly; then, a little later, silent, staring off.
We came to where the fields gave way to tall tangled grass and huge weeds and forest. The mountain rose steeply above us, and we turned and walked along its base, the rows of Christmas trees at our side. With each few steps, another long, thin corridor appeared, descending out of sight.
Where the trees ended, a shallow, overgrown ditch separated the neighbor’s blueberry farm from our land. There was a bad smell, like an alley trash can in the city, behind one of my father’s seafood stores.
“He got some bears,” he said, and told me that our neighbor had set up bear traps. He waded into the yellow grass, crushing a path that I followed.
I stretched my neck. He’d often warned
